NPR’s Jason Sheehan wrote in his review of this dense read:

“What would you do if monsters were real?

Cadwell Turnbull knows exactly what you’d do. Almost all of you. Almost all the time.

You’d do nothing.“

So much happens in this book. Remember True Blood and/or the Sookie Stackhouse series in which vampires came out of the closet and then all the other supernatural types were having to figure out whether or not to reveal themselves? Well here we have an African American author who envisions yet another video of police murdering a Black man, only, this time, the victim transforms into a wolf before dying and other werewolves protest by revealing themselves forcing people to deal with “the Fracture” – a sudden revelation that magic and supernaturals are real and helpful and harmful and neutral and chaotic and rife for exploitation as everything else in existence.

And people still want to believe otherwise. Or just want to kill it with fire. Or do any of the other useless and/or harmful things that humans have always done to avoid reality or change or any/all other things that need to be dealt with in order to avoid collective pain and loss. See also the recent, Don’t Look Up.

The title grabbed me out of a stack of selections of horror written by POC: and yes, the author does seem to have a wonderfully inclusive anarchist bent that gives us a Rainbow Coalition of characters with a variety of classes, ideologies, sexualities (included ace) and gender identities to deal with on top of their merely mortal or fantastically magical selves – many of whom are trying to create a better way of living that would remove the hierarchies that have us already teetering on the eve of destruction. I actually had a Queer Nation flashback during a scene taking place during a meeting of a collective in which the very different members all had equal say and consensus was sought. Meetings are never a fun way to spend an evening, but I’d rather attend a month of meetings with people trying to make society better via self education & direct action than avoid the millions of business meetings held every hour by those whose only goal is squeezing out more profits before the sun explodes.

I really want to think that, faced with a world where so many more things are possible, I would try and do something to make things better with many of the newly revealed beings. Magical Nation or some such, maybe?